The Trips of a Lifetime

Earlier this year, I made the difficult decision to quit my full-time teaching job at a primary school in West London. It was a good job: lovely people, great location and pretty well-paid. But I just wasn’t happy anymore. I’d been teaching for twelve years by this point (11 years as a full-time teacher and some supply work when I went travelling for six months) and as much as I loved being in my classroom with my children, it just wasn’t the job that I’d started when I’d left university at 21, all fresh-faced and eager. “It must be such a nice job,” people always said to me. But the niceness was being squeezed out. When I had to choose doing a Maths assessment over making Christmas decorations in the week before the holidays, I knew something had to change for me. So, I quit.

But even now, seven months after telling my head that I had decided to leave, I still have no idea what I want to do instead. Other than try to make myself happy again. The year I spent travelling and doing supply work back in 2013 and 2014 was probably one of the happiest and most relaxed year I have ever had the pleasure of living through. And yes, I know it wasn’t exactly Real Life (I spent six months on a glorified holiday and worked for no more than a month for goodness sake!) but I figure, why can’t I make that Real for myself? Why can’t I find some sort of balance between Work and Play?

And so, that’s what I’m trying to do now. I’ve signed up for supply teaching again, meaning that whilst I still get to spend time doing the fun stuff in a classroom (albeit on a much lower pay-scale), I don’t have to worry anymore about planning and assessments and paperwork and meetings. And did I mention paperwork? Meaning that I now have a hell of a lot more time and energy for enjoying some of the fun things in life. Like lunches and nights out and museum visits. And travel. So much more travel! When I think back to my happiest times, most of them have been spent in the sunshine, in places I’ve never visited before, enjoying the sights and delicious local foods. And the more places I visit, the more I crave that feeling of going somewhere new.

It was whilst I was on a Girls’ Road Trip through Texas that I first had that feeling. We’d just finished a boat tour through the swamps, searching for alligators, and were lazily wandering the streets of New Orleans, drinking in the sunshine and the gorgeous architecture, when I was hit by the earth-shattering realisation that the world was such a big and beautiful place but that I had only seen such a tiny section of it. And I wanted to see more of it. Places I’d never dreamed of actually ever being able to visit. Like the awe-inspiring temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. I literally cried when, standing in front of a tree-riddled building at Ta Prohm, I realised I’d achieved a dream of visiting I’d had from since before I even knew it was possible to visit. Cambodia had always seemed so exotic and far-flung. How did people even arrange flights there, let alone find temples hidden in a jungle?

And since then there’s been more: the bustling souks of Morocco, Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico City, sunrise over the Sahara.

And I have experienced things that I never dreamed I would have been able to share in. Things like scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef and skydiving over Franz Josef on the South Island of New Zealand. And Día de Muertos in Oaxaca, Mexico, which I would never have been able to take part in if I hadn’t taken the leap and decided to leave full-time teaching again. Because whilst the school holidays are great, I found them so limiting. I would never have been able to watch the parades for the Moors and Christians festival in Altea, Spain, in September or to go Christmas shopping in New York in December if I was tied to Term Times. 

But now I am free to explore the world. I can visit new places. Places that I had always felt were too big, too far away, too out of the norm for me to visit. But they’re not. 

I have been to these places now. 

And I want more.